Light field displays have emerged to provide viewers a more accurate visual reproduction of three-dimensional (“3D”) real-world scenes without the need for specialized viewing glasses. Such displays emulate a light field, which represents the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space. The goal is to enable multiple viewers to simultaneously experience a true 3D stereoscopic effect from multiple viewpoints, by capturing a light field passing through a physical surface and emitting the same light field through a display screen. Doing so has the potential to revolutionize many visual-based applications in areas as diverse as entertainment, business, medicine, and art, among others.
Light field displays typically operate in conjunction with an array of cameras and an array of projectors. The array of cameras is used to acquire the light fields and the array of projectors is used to display the light fields onto a display screen. Instead of pixel elements that generate light that is spread in all directions, each element in the display screen generates light beams with different colors and intensities for different viewing directions. Providing a true 3D experience therefore requires light to be modulated on several million display elements, which in turn generate different light values for thousands of different directions. This results in extremely large amounts of data to be processed for each display element.